European Restaurant Technology Deployment

Context

A leading Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) company, with over 73 years of business, is considering IT essential to support its growth rate, to drive efficiency and ensure quality consistency of services offered towards the end users. The company is actively investing in development of new infrastructure technologies in the restaurants in all European countries and beyond, to ensure a solid foundation for the upcoming business technologies.

ACROM is a QSR partner in Europe, offering IT services both in the Romanian market, as well in the European corporate and restaurants domains, with core services offered covering network design, administration and support, Enterprise Application Integration and restaurant infrastructure deployment assistance and support.

ACROM, as a European partner, has been a proud member of a multinational team led by European headquarters managers, which was tasked to install the newest, most advanced restaurant technology platform to date in more than 7000 European restaurants across the continent, from Ireland all the way to Russia. The 4-year project has approached a successful end in October 2014, with next years focused on new applications and systems being set to roll-out on this platform.

Challenges

The project was unique due to its complexity, proportions and the geographical spread of its scope, spanning multiple markets with different cultural backgrounds. Thoroughly planned to meet tight implementation deadlines, it required coordination with more than 30 local market’s IT teams across Europe, for which multiple on-site visits and work-sessions were necessary.

Constantly on the move, the ACROM team, composed of infrastructure engineers, collaborated with local IT teams, both during on-site visits, as well as part of remote sessions, to perform market personalization, demonstrate functionality and benefits, perform adequate training and hands on installations to ensure that all installation steps for the new technologies are well understood and performed correctly, and that all company’s IT standards are being carefully and strictly followed. The objective was to ensure a quick and smooth deployment process under strict time constraints, dealing with a complex infrastructure environment, while having a minimal impact to the business and being fully transparent to the final client.

ACROM’s infrastructure engineers have sequentially met and discussed with all local IT teams across Europe, presenting the key benefits of the new end-to-end solution and technologies, verifying that standards are well understood and proper equipment can be procured. Subsequently, ACROM infrastructure engineers have worked closely with local market’s IT teams to train them appropriately, and to build real-scale environments in specialized labs, which included:

For all of these, the team has providing step-by-step training for building such environments, the rationale behind it, and helped them pilot this new infrastructure in their local active stores, up to the point in which it could be replicated by local teams in remaining stores under remote ACROM supervision and assistance.

Client’s Benefits

The Quick Service Restaurants company is setting itself again as a leader, this time in terms of technologies behind the scenes of the most successful quick service restaurants business in the world. The new technologies that ACROM engineers and other partners have brought in the European restaurants will enable a whole range of revolutionary applications to be brought in, aimed to help the client have a more satisfying and rewarding experience in its stores.
From a deployment perspective, the QSR company has also gained additional benefits:

Less customer effort due to Dedicated Project Manager – One single point of contact to know everything about the status of the project